The Half-Made World

by Felix Gilman

Lowry. So, Liv thought, Lowry was the name of the man who’d pursued her all that way. An ugly name, an ugly voice.

  She recalled standing on the Concourse at Gloriana Station, in the shadows under the great weight of rusty iron that was the Station’s roof, listening to the boom and reverb of their voice-amplifier devices, which broadcast the Engines’ commands, marked out the hours, inflicted the awe the Engines demanded. But in Gloriana, there had been dozens of the devices, hung in the rafters like huge bats, so that the echoes played back and forth and the noise filled every crevice of awareness. Lowry couldn’t possibly have dragged more than one of the devices all the way to New Design, and that insufficiency was apparent. The sound was vast but not deep. The whine was the whine of a machine pushed past its limits and close to breaking. It slurred and howled. It echoed. She prayed for it to break.

  “LISTEN, NEW DESIGN. I HAVE A PRISONER. I TOOK ONE OF YOUR SCOUTS. HE SAYS HIS NAME IS HAYWORTH. LISTEN TO THIS, THEN.”

  There was a new voice, screaming, begging for mercy, driving the sound up into a dreadful pitch, until it was impossible to distinguish the man’s screams from the machine’s, from the echoes still sounding down the streets.

  Silence suddenly resumed.

  Hulgins stared at the sky. He held his hands trembling near his ears as if desperate to give in to fear and cover them. Liv reached out a hand to comfort him; changing her mind, she withdrew it and took a step back. He didn’t notice.

  “HEAR THAT? HE TOLD ME YOUR STRENGTHS. HAYWORTH. WE KNOW WHAT YOU’VE GOT. YOU KNOW YOU CAN’T FIGHT. YOU RAN FROM US ONCE. BRING OUT THE OLD MAN AND WE’LL LEAVE YOU ALONE. I REPEAT: BRING HIM OUT, WE’LL BE ON OUR WAY.”

  Liv took another slow step away from Hulgins’s side.

  “IN HALF AN HOUR IF HE’S NOT OUT HERE’S WHAT WE’LL DO.”

  There was a cough like a thunder clap. The voice resumed, but now it was hard to make out the words; the voice had started to mumble, rant and ramble and whine, drifting sometimes too close and sometimes too far from the mouthpiece of the amplifier as if Lowry swayed back and forth in neurotic discomfort.

  Lowry turned his head away from the amplifier and covered the speaking-plate with his hand. He’d tried to think of some horror with which to threaten New Design, and, not being imaginative, his thoughts had naturally run straight and true back to the last time he’d faced the armies of the Republic. His mind filled with visions of Black Cap Valley—the wire, the muck, the poison flowers that thrived there, how he crawled through it, the riflemen of the Republic with their steady hands and clear merciless eyes picking off the boys on either side of him, one by one, like the children of the Line were worth less than ants. It shook his calm for a moment.

  He began again.

  “What we’ll do is first we’ll shake down your walls.” He leaned in close and muttered into the speaking-plate, and it threw his voice out into the air so that it seemed the sky itself boomed with his own private thoughts. “We’ll flatten your homes. We’ll destroy what you’ve made. We’ll leave only mud and muck. We’ll dig you up. We’ll do this because it’s our duty and what the fuck else are we going to do with ourselves? You’ll see. We’ll send smoke and noise, the old ones, your old men, they’ll remember, they’ll tell you what it’s like, they’ll be the ones to go first, it’s always the old who go first. Or the children. It’s always the children who get it hardest. Choking up black dust. Bleeding from the eyes and the ears. Old men go mad. The children go old and gray, they look like they’re a thousand years old when they die. I don’t want to do that. I really don’t, I really don’t fucking care if I do or I don’t. There’s no pleasure in this. This is my job. But then I’ll send my boys in. You’ll be on your knees pleading when they cut your throats. Everything’s flat and clean and so quiet after we’ve passed through a place, it’s so easy for everyone who comes after us, but you should see what it’s like for us, at the hard edge, where you have to cut and you have to get cut. The blasting edge. If some of you are still standing when we come in, it’s going to make it harder but it won’t . . . Fuck!”

  Sparks flew and the red-hot speaking-plate snapped off under pressure of internal stresses and cut Lowry’s cheek.

  There was a sudden electrical crackle, a snap, a drop in air pressure, a silence that was full of dying echoes. The voice had gone.

  In fact, Liv had hardly been able to hear a thing it said for some time. She’d not been listening anyway. Hulgin had frozen in terror at the first moment the voice began, and closed his eyes and begun to mutter slogans of Smiler self-affirmation. She took that moment to inch away slowly. As soon as it became clear that Hulgins hadn’t noticed what she was doing, she ran.

  She saw Mr. Waite the Smiler by the water pump, leading a group of boys in an affirmation of resolve and courage and pride. None of the boys had rifles: they had spears, and bows, and knives. They wore furs, under which their thin bodies were tense and trembling. Waite looked like a boy himself, and Liv supposed he was, in a way: he must have been of the generation that did not remember the old world, that had been reared outside of time and history, and had never, therefore, grown up. The smile on his face was ridiculously wide and confident. Liv thought of the department store dummies she’d seen on some of her infrequent visits to Koenigswald’s big cities, in quieter, saner times. Waite’s smile had that same quality of waxy artless salesmanship. She smiled back and nodded. She slowed to a walk. Waite and the boys watched her as she passed. She tried to look as though she had legitimate business, somewhere important to be. She didn’t know where she was going.

  When Bradley’s arm tired, he lowered the bomb. He held it at his side, fidgeting with the hammer. His face twitched and snarled.

  —He feels foolish, Creedmoor. You make him look ridiculous in front of his men. He imagined a heroic confrontation. This waiting is farce.

  —You always perceive our weaknesses, my friend.

  —He is only more dangerous for it. He may act foolishly. He is keen to die grandly. His old fingers tremble.

  —Do you hear that? That whine, that tremor, abusing the ether. Our pursuers are clearing the throats of their hideous machines. They are about to sing their unmusical song. Will this be the sound that kills, or are they going to speak, first?

  —Every sound the Line makes kills, Creedmoor. Either the body or the spirit. Only we offer true life.

  —Is that what you call it?

  —Watch Bradley. If his attention falters, kill him.

  Lowry’s flat nasal voice settled over the town like a foul rain; it crept in through the hospital’s curtained windows. “I REPEAT: BRING HIM OUT, WE’LL BE ON OUR WAY. IN HALF AN HOUR IF HE’S NOT OUT HERE’S WHAT WE’LL DO. . . .”

  Bradley’s riflemen went pale with dread and their weapons began to tremble; but Bradley was made of stronger stuff, and though his eyes, red rimmed, started to water, they didn’t flinch from Creedmoor’s hovering hand.

  Creedmoor raised his voice over the din. “He’s lying, Dr. Bradley. You know it. The Line leaves nothing unchanged. He won’t just take his men away. He’ll destroy you. It was already too late for you long before they got here. Do you know when it was too late? When they sat down and looked at their maps and drew the line of their progress, and you were in their way. There may not even be particular malice in it. You’ll die here, Doctor. But something can be saved. Let me take the General away from here.”

  Bradley’s eyes opened wide. He sneered.

  “Now I know what you’re thinking, Doctor: He’s old, even older than you, or me, and quite mad, and what’s he that’s worth saving, all on his own? But hear me out, Doctor. The General has a secret. Did my friend Liv tell you that? I know what it is. I’m in on the secret. A weapon. The First Folk have a weapon. Or not so much a weapon as an idea, maybe, or a dream, or something we have no words for. They offered it to him.”

  Creedmoor turned to Bradley’s riflemen. “You’re young,” he said. “Do you know that the General used to pal around wit
h a fellow of the Folk? A caster of stones, a wise man, a something-or-other. I met his wife, believe it or not. The General made a deal with the Folk, I reckon. They built his Republic for him and in return—”

  Bradley spat. “Shut up, monster.”

  “Don’t like that sort of talk, eh, Doctor? Mystical bullshit, tarnishing your glorious rational virtuous origins. But listen: They promised him a weapon. The weapon puts an end to spirits, Dr. Bradley. A final end. I know you’ve destroyed Engines and maybe you broke Guns, but you know you only broke their housings, you know they came back, they would always come back, like the Folk themselves, like nightmares, like a disease with no cure. And so they never learned fear.”

  —Why are you telling him this, Creedmoor?

  From behind Creedmoor’s back came the sound of the General turning in bed, whimpering, muttering. Some of the riflemen glanced uneasily over at him, dividing their attention.

  “See? He remembers, somewhere down in the rubble of his mind. He found it. He sent a letter home to his family, you see, before his last ride. Then he vanished. The Line caught him. Most likely by mistake; they throw those ugly bombs around like toys. Someone brought him down the mountain—and believe me, we’d like to know who. Somehow he ended up in an eerie little hospital back on the world’s edge not that many weeks east of here. What if he still holds the secret? If he still deep down knows where to find that weapon? Or how to make it? What if he found it? He won’t live long. Your town, your Republic, your world is dead. You’ll never have that weapon. But what if I had it? We could kill the Engines. We could teach them fear. You could be revenged. Will you consider it?”

  Bradley raised the bomb again, as if he intended to strike Creedmoor with it. “We don’t make deals with your kind, monster. You pervert everything you touch. We saw too many nations fall to your kind. We stand on our own.”

  The riflemen flanking Bradley looked wary, Creedmoor noted. But of course, they were irrelevant. Creedmoor had no doubt he could outdraw their trigger-fingers, could outrun their bullets, could even take the wound if necessary.

  “Suppose I fought alongside you, Doctor. If you disarm that bomb, I give you my word I’ll hold back the Linesmen as long as I can. You know your people are no match for them. I can make no promise of success, but I believe I may even the odds. You yourself might survive. Do you have children here? A young second wife, maybe?”

  “Mind your business, Creedmoor.”

  “You’ve played a weak hand well, Doctor. Perhaps you’ve saved your people. You should accept my aid with pride.”

  “Your word means nothing, Creedmoor. We’ll make no deals.”

  “You used not to be so inflexible, Doctor. Back in the old days, back in the world behind us. Oh, your General and your charters and your speechifying men in medals or top hats all said, stand on your own feet; a government of laws, not Powers; have no truck with devilry . . . all that. I remember the speeches, Doctor. But even back then, you couldn’t keep my kind out. Your sons and daughters dreamed of us. When your leaders were weak and afraid, they let us in. At Wolverhampton, and Tin Hill, and Syme, and a dozen other places, they called on us for aid. It’s not in the history books, but it’s known by those who care to know. You wouldn’t be the first to bend a little.”

  “That was back in the old world, Creedmoor. We’re a purer strain out here. Our sons and daughters are taught virtue. No deals.”

  “Well then fuck you, Doctor.”

  Creedmoor drew and fired, and the air, which had gone silent when Lowry’s machine stopped howling some minutes ago, echoed again. The riflemen all drew in their breath. Bradley’s body fell stiffly backwards, the long black coat opening out behind him. He let go of his walking stick, and it balanced on its steel tip for a moment then fell slowly forward. He let go of the bomb and it fell leadenly toward the earth. The hammer arced toward the striking-plate. There was a tiny screech of wire and a creak of uncoiling springs. A slow shiver and scrape of metal.

  Creedmoor, already in motion, crossing the floor in fractions of a second, leaping across the beds in his path (their wooden frames sounding under his feet like drums) heard every slow sound with painful clarity. Launching himself from the last of the beds, he twisted in the air. His old bones creaked and his muscles nearly tore. He focused his will; the flesh could only slow him down. He hit the floor hard on his back, sliding over the hard-packed dirt. The bomb fell with a thud into his outstretched hand. He fumbled his thumb in between the striking-plate and the descending hammer. It stabbed down on the quick of his nail. It was a sharp little thing and it drew a tiny jewel of blood out of him. Fuck, he said; but it worked. The bomb remained silent.

  —You madman, Creedmoor. You fool. What if you’d been too slow?

  —Then I would be dead, or worse. You could go howling back to that dark place where your kind lodge. You could curse my name.

  The three riflemen were standing around looking stupid, their rifles still trained on the place where he’d been standing the half second before. Creedmoor stood and shot them in quick succession.

  He wasn’t sure how to disarm the device. In the end, he simply tore off the hammer and flicked it into the corner of the room. For good measure, he prized off the striking-plate. That seemed to work. He kicked what was left of the bomb under a bed.

  A terrible crash sounded outside, off in the distance, like a resounding echo of Creedmoor’s own gunshots. Like now that he’d begun the killing, it was ricocheting madly out of his control: like it was all his fault once again.

  CHAPTER 49

  NEW DESIGN AT WAR

  Dawn came. The sun rose in the west, behind thick dark clouds.. Lowry watched New Design’s walls, from which no surrender party emerged, over which no white flag was flown.

  Subaltern Mill stood beside him. “Time’s up, sir.”

  “Is it?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  “Huh.” The problem was that none of Lowry’s men’s timepieces worked right anymore. If they hadn’t been waterlogged in the rains or battered and cracked along the march, they’d stopped working for more mysterious reasons. Their hands spun meaninglessly, or hardly at all. Time out here was not yet ready to be measured. So Lowry waited, indecisively, for what felt like much longer than half an hour. He was waiting for orders. He was waiting for something to tick over and give him his signal. He waited, listening to the prisoner moan and pray, listening to his men mutter nervously, listening for sounds of surrender from New Design. And he was still waiting when there was a soft distant thump from behind the town’s walls, and a line of black smoke vented into the sky, and a shell came arcing up and then down again, falling well short of Lowry’s front lines, killing no one. A second shell followed instants later, and killed half a dozen.

  The soldiers of New Design had brought up their cannon into a beet-field near the center of town. The deerlike things that had been corralled in the pen next door had been evicted. Some of the creatures stood around looking on, nervous and whinnying and incontinent. Others fled.

  Liv watched the cannon move in from down the end of the street. She peered around the wall of that odd octagonal repository of books—the lock of which was broken, and now some of the deer-things hid in its shadows and grazed its shelves.

  There were two cannon. Two long metal stalks, each rising from two heavy wheels that churned the mud of the beet-field. Different models—one was much smaller than the other, and put Liv in mind of a polio-shriveled limb. Their metal gleamed in the dawn light. They’d been well looked after.

  A team of men dragged them with ropes. The ground was soft, and it took ten men apiece. Captain Morton led them. When it came time to set the charges, he pushed the younger men away and kneeled down in the muck to do the work himself.

  They worked quickly and confidently, they were well drilled. They had the guns in place well before Lowry’s half hour was near up, even if one counted from the moment his rant began, and not from the moment the fuses fried and
silence reclaimed the air. Or so Liv guessed—her own golden pocket watch was still worthless.

  Morton stood looking out east across the beet-field. There was a dull glow in the distance. Not firelight; something cold and electric lit Lowry’s camp.

  At no particular signal Liv could see, Morton knelt again by the base of the fatter, healthier cannon. A younger man applied himself to the undercarriage of the weaker cannon and mirrored Morton’s motions. Both men stood well back.

  The cannons sounded.

  Liv shielded her eyes from the flash. She had only a vague impression of thick black lines scored across the gunmetal sky. She went running, head down, and did not see the distant flicker where the shells struck, or the smoke rising.

  Lowry’s retaliation came quick. Liv heard something whistling overhead, and didn’t look up. It flew with an incongruously bright and cheerful sound. She was well away down the street and through a muddy close between houses when she heard the sound of the device striking—a sound that reached her first as a dull despairing thud, as of a suicide’s body falling from a bridge, and then repeated itself, again and again, harsher each time, louder and louder, gathering steam but not rhythm, until it was no longer sad and quiet, but persistent, manic, onrushing. It had no pattern; it lurched toward structure and shattered it, crashing on, and on—it had the pulse of dying muscle tissue, spasming, or the last firings of a diseased brain. Liv fell against a wall of haystacks and a fence of wet wood, and covered her ears.

  The sound washed over her and was gone. Her eyes felt terribly swollen. Her nose was bleeding.

  The device had struck where Morton stood. New Design’s cannon were silent. Liv did not look back.

  She staggered south. Men and boys ran back and forth around her, stumbling with their rifles or bows or spears. There was another cheerful whistling sound from the north, and from the west, and then the mad drone and thunder of the Line’s weapons echoed distantly over the town. Neither device struck close enough to Liv for the sound to destroy her; even so the muffled echo of it was enough to make her belly lurch as if miscarrying, and she stopped to retch into a water trough. Nothing inside to expel but bad air. She slumped against the trough’s side and pressed her cheek against the cold wood.